In a powerful and deeply personal essay, Dr. César A. Cruz sounds the alarm over what he describes as the accelerating dismantling of the historic mission of University of California, Berkeley. Writing not only as an alum but as the parent of a first-year student, Cruz chronicles what he sees as a devastating pattern of institutional capitulation: the university’s disclosure of student and faculty information to federal investigators, the closure and depoliticization of the Multicultural Community Center, the nonrenewal of Ethnic Studies lecturers amid claims of budget deficits, and the construction of athletic facilities on Ohlone ancestral remains.
For Dr. Cruz, these are not isolated incidents but interconnected signs of a university abandoning its legacy of free speech, ethnic studies, public accountability, and resistance to state repression. His essay frames these developments as part of a broader political project of neutralizing dissent, defunding critical scholarship, and erasing historically marginalized communities under the language of “inclusion,” “safety,” and administrative “reform.”
Ultimately, Dr. Cruz calls on students, faculty, alumni, and community members to reject silence and organize collectively to defend Ethnic Studies, public higher education, and the democratic purposes the university once claimed to embody.
-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
What Cal Is This?A Year of Repression at UC Berkeley, and the Call to Take It Back
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| Illustration by Masha Noar |
By Dr. César A. Cruz | May 1, 2026 | Medium.com
Roll on you Bears has a different ring these days.
I am a Cal alum. My wife Jazmin is a Cal alum. And this past fall, we sent our son to UC Berkeley as a first-year student, proud, hopeful, carrying with him everything we believed this university to be, the Free Speech Movement, the Third World Liberation Front, the hunger strikers who built ethnic studies with their bodies, the tradition of a public university that dared to tell the truth about power.
He arrived in August. Within weeks, the chancellor turned in 160 students to the federal government.
That is the welcome Chancellor Rich Lyons extended to my son’s class.
The university that birthed the Free Speech Movement, that has long claimed itself a sanctuary of intellectual courage and public purpose, is finishing a year that should make every alumna, every donor, every student of conscience, every staff person ask the question clearly and out loud: What Cal is this? Who is running it? And who is it running for?
I am not asking as an outsider. I am asking as someone who loved this institution, who sent his family to this institution, who is watching this institution betray everything it claimed to stand for, in real time, in the first year of my son’s education.
I am asking because the evidence is undeniable, the pattern is unmistakable, and the silence of the administration has become its own answer.
Let us go through it, month by month, like a wound that keeps opening.
Fall 2025: The Chancellor Turns In His Own Students
The year began with a betrayal. In September 2025, UC Berkeley provided the personal information of roughly 160 students, faculty, and staff to the Trump administration, complying with a federal investigation into alleged antisemitism on campus. The university’s Office of Legal Affairs sent letters to affected individuals on September 4, notifying them that their names and information had already been disclosed, over two weeks earlier, without their knowledge.
Among those named was Judith Butler, one of the most celebrated Jewish feminist scholars in the world, whose family lost members in the Holocaust, and who has since described the experience as being trapped in “Kafka-land.” As reported in The Guardian, Butler said: “We have a right to know the charges against us, to know who has made the charges and to review them and defend ourselves. But none of that has happened.”
A campus graduate student told the Daily Cal that the disclosure appeared to target anyone who had ever been accused of antisemitism, which, as they put it plainly, “includes a lot of Palestinians.” The same student added that whenever they taught about Palestine, it usually led to an investigation, and they believed those files were what got turned over.
This is not compliance. This is capitulation. This is a chancellor choosing federal favor over the safety of his own students, his own faculty, his own community.
Who is this Cal? Not the one I was taught to revere.
November 2025: The Right Wing Comes to Sproul, and the Administration Rolls Out the Welcome Mat
Two months after Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was killed at a Utah university, his organization concluded its American Comeback Tour at UC Berkeley on November 10. According to CalMatters, administrators would not disclose their security plans but confirmed they were prepared to host the event. Outside, students, most of them far younger than the attendees inside, faced police in riot gear, with physical fights and arrests. One man was taken to the hospital with a head wound.
Inside, speakers told the crowd that the left were not their friends and would mock and dehumanize them. Comedian Rob Schneider told the audience that God said Trump is his guy, and that if you do not assimilate, it is an invasion.
The day after, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon announced a DOJ Civil Rights Division investigation into the event, adding another federal layer of pressure onto a campus administration already on its knees.
The right wing can fund a bus tour to Berkeley, bring riot police, and walk away with a federal press conference. Students of color organizing for Palestinian lives get their names handed to the government. That is the double standard. That is the definition of whose lives this administration is protecting.
Late 2025: The Multicultural Community Center Is Silently Shuttered
Then came the closure, sudden and unexplained, of the Multicultural Community Center, the beloved, student-built, student-run heart of multiracial organizing on campus.
The Daily Californian reported that UC Berkeley indefinitely closed the MCC, a space that offers cross-cultural community building, due to, in administration’s words, “criticism received from a number of campus stakeholders.” The MCC, located in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union building, had been a hub for generations of students of color, a space where LaNada War Jack launched her book, where Alicia Garza spoke, where community was held and futures were imagined.
Interns at the center were initially not even told it was closing. When they found out, they were told the closure was connected to conversations with the chancellor’s office about “operating procedures.” The explicit concerns mentioned by administrators, as the Daily Cal reported, pertained to art and signage on their windows and walls, including anything that related to student activism, international relations, or ethnic studies.
One junior MCC intern, speaking anonymously out of fear of retaliation, connected the closure directly to federal investigations, saying, “We’re caught up in this antisemitism debate that’s going across all university campuses. Because of the signage that was on our walls, they decided to not have the space basically be open for any group.”
A second-year graduate student, Anya Kushwaha, described it as “really devastating, particularly for the student organizing community on campus, but also just for students at large, especially students of color, who’ve been in need of resources.”
Students won this space in 1999, after a hunger strike, after sitting in front of the chancellor’s office with tombstones erected for every class that had disappeared. Now the administration closed it without a word. Not even a phone call.
April 2026: Political Art Stripped from the MCC
After months of community pressure, the university announced it would reopen the MCC, with Chancellor Rich Lyons stating he wanted to make it “more welcoming, not less.” But what reopened was not what the community built.
As reported by Open Campus and Berkeleyside, by April 2026 all political art had been stripped from the center, the same art that reflected the movement from which the MCC was born. The center’s six-point founding mission, student-led, anti-oppression, cross-cultural understanding, sustainability and wellness, popular education, and social justice, has been quietly gutted by administrators who call the erasure “welcoming.”
Doctoral student Sarah Halabe, studying ethnic studies, named the contradiction plainly: “The administration is saying, ‘Oh no, you’re not being inclusive,’ when the Multicultural Community Center was founded to be inclusive of marginalized students.”
At a time, as Open Campus documented, when Trump officials and Congressional Republicans have initiated at least seven separate investigations into UC Berkeley since 2024, and when campuses across the country are banning the teaching of race and gender under federal pressure, what is happening at the MCC is not neutral reform. It is a whitewashing under duress, carried out by an administration that has chosen compliance over covenant.
They stripped the walls. They thought no one would notice. We noticed.
This Month: They Build a Volleyball Court Over Ohlone Remains
And then, last week, this. Construction workers building a new beach volleyball complex at Bancroft Way and Fulton Street unearthed the skeletal remains of at least one Native American person. The remains were found two feet underground, covered by concrete.
As Berkeleyside reported, the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, the Ohlone group with ancestral ties to this land, are now working with the university to care for the remains. Their chair, Corinna Gould, said her community would be involved in determining next steps. California law requires all construction to stop immediately when human remains are found outside a cemetery, and UC Berkeley paused work at the site.
The beach volleyball complex, by the university’s own materials, is a five-court sand facility with berm seating for approximately 500 spectators. It is described by the contractor as a “state-of-the-art home for Cal Athletics beach volleyball” and “a welcoming gateway to the campus park.” Imagine we have money for beach volleyball, but not our collective histories? Chancellor, what priorities do you have? Who do you serve?
A welcoming gateway. Built on Ohlone bones.
This is the same institution that cannot fund the ethnic studies lecturers who teach the history of these very communities. The same institution that stripped the murals from a space named after Martin Luther King Jr. The same institution that handed over the names of 160 people exercising their First Amendment rights to a federal government that has made no secret of its agenda.
They can build a volleyball court. They cannot protect the people who teach us why this land is sacred.
Today: Ethnic Studies Lecturers Are Let Go
And today, April 30th, we learn that UC Berkeley’s ethnic studies department will not renew two lecturer positions for the 2026–27 academic year due to “financial deficits.” The Daily Californian reported that this represents an elimination of ten percent of courses taught by lecturers in the department, and that the affected lecturers, pre-six faculty who have not yet earned continuing status, received no direct communication from the department or the dean’s office.
Lecturer Diana Negrín found out her fall course had been dropped when she checked the course catalog herself. “Neither the Dean’s office nor the department have actually said a thing to us as professors, nor to the students,” she said.
Lecturer Juan Berumen believes he may also be cut. Lecturer Jesus Barraza, who teaches more than 250 students a year, described the university’s relationship to ethnic studies as clear: “The University treats Ethnic Studies as an academic ghetto. From the Department’s inception, the University has looked for ways to starve the Department.”
Continuing lecturer Pablo Gonzalez, despite 14 years at Berkeley and a Distinguished Teaching Award, says his “suitcase is always packed.”
David Skolnick, co-chair of the Bay Area chapter of UC-AFT, said the budget process is “intentionally opaque so that we can’t really hold the administration accountable for these kinds of decisions.”
We have seen this before. In 1999, students put tombstones in front of the chancellor’s office for every ethnic studies class that disappeared. The tombstones are back. The graves are multiplying.
To the Ethnic Studies Department: You Teach This Moment. Now Live It.
I want to speak directly to the faculty, the lecturers, the graduate students, and the staff of the UC Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies, because this moment requires more than a statement and more than a meeting.
You are the department that was born from a hunger strike. You are the discipline that exists because students in 1969 refused to accept a university that erased them, and because they were willing to put their bodies on the line to say so. Your syllabi include Fanon and Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde and Rodolfo Acuña, James Baldwin and Gloria Anzaldúa. You assign bell hooks on love and Paulo Freire on pedagogy. You teach your students that neutrality in the face of oppression is not neutrality, it is complicity.
And now the institution you have served, many of you for decades, is firing your colleagues without notice. It is building a volleyball court on the bones of the people whose stories you teach. It is stripping the walls of the center your students won through hunger. It is handing the names of students, many of them yours, to a federal government that has declared war on the very communities ethnic studies was created to center.
This is not abstract. This is not a case study. This is your department. This is your moment.
Ethnic studies was never meant to be a safe academic harbor. It was meant to be a site of transformation, a place where the knowledge produced by communities in struggle became power, became praxis, became movement. Lecturer Jesus Barraza already named it: you are in an “academic ghetto,” underfunded and undervalued by design. You have always known this. The question is what you are going to do about it now, when the stakes are highest and the administration is most exposed.
We are calling on the ethnic studies department to hold emergency town halls with students and community. To refuse the opacity of budget decisions made without consultation. To stand publicly and loudly against the firing of Diana Negrín and Juan Berumen. To demand that every retired or departing faculty line be replaced. To partner with the MCC and refuse to let the administration neutralize either institution in isolation. To use your scholarship as testimony, your classrooms as organizing spaces, your collective voice as the instrument it was always meant to be.
You teach Ella Baker, who said the strength of the movement is in the people, not in the charisma of a leader. You teach the Combahee River Collective, who knew that their liberation was bound up with everyone else’s. You teach Larry Itliong and Dolores Huerta, who built power not through permission but through presence and sacrifice.
The administration is counting on your exhaustion. It is counting on the precarity of your lecturers to keep everyone too afraid to speak. It is counting on the siloing of departments, programs, and communities to prevent a unified response.
Prove them wrong.
Your students are watching. Your ancestors are watching. The Ohlone, whose remains were found beneath the ground where the university builds its athletics complex, are watching. History is watching.
You did not choose ethnic studies as a career. You chose it as a calling. Answer it.
The Pattern Is the Message
Let me be clear about what this is. This is not a series of coincidences. This is not budget math. This is not a neutral response to federal pressure.
This is an administration that has, over the course of one academic year, handed students to the federal government, welcomed a right-wing organization with riot police escort, closed and gutted a student-built multicultural center, built a volleyball court on sacred ancestral ground, and fired the professors who teach the history of the people whose bones they found in the dirt.
This is an administration doing the work of those who have always wanted to erase us, bury us, neutralize us, and call it welcoming.
And the funders who bankroll this institution, many of whom profess to care about justice, about equity, about the university’s public mission, need to ask themselves: Is this the institution I am funding? Is this the legacy I am building? Can you write a check to this chancellor and sleep well?
We are calling for the resignation of Chancellor Rich Lyons.
We are calling on the UC Regents to do what they were appointed to do and govern.
We are calling on alumni, and I count myself and my wife Jazmin among you, to withhold donations until this administration demonstrates through action, not press releases, that it serves all of its students and not just those whose politics make the federal government comfortable.
As alumni, we did not give our years and our tuition and our love to this institution so that a chancellor could hand our children’s classmates to the federal government in the first month of school. Jazmin and I sent our son to Cal because we believed in what Cal said it was. We are still here. We are still watching. And we are not writing another check until this administration remembers who built it and who it was built to serve.
We are calling on students to keep organizing, keep documenting, keep showing up to Sproul Plaza the way those who came before you did when they put tombstones outside the chancellor’s office. My son is among you now. You are not alone.
We are calling on ethnic studies faculty, emeriti, allies in every department, to refuse to let the department be starved in silence.
We are calling on the Ohlone community, the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, to be centered in every conversation about this land, because it is their land first, and whatever is built here should honor that truth, not pave over it.
This is Cal. It always has been. And as alumni, as parents, as community, as people who have not forgotten what this place promised, we are taking it back.
Do Not Let Business as Usual Continue. Contact Them. Now.
If you have read this far and you are feeling something, good. Now do something with it. Because the people who came before you did not just feel things. They acted. They fasted. They occupied buildings. They put their bodies and their futures on the line. They did not wait for the right moment or the polite channel or permission from the very institution they were challenging. They moved.
And what are you doing?
If you are an alum writing a check every year and telling yourself that your donation supports students, ask yourself which students it is supporting right now, because it is not the ones who got turned in to the federal government. It is not the ones losing ethnic studies courses. It is not the ones who walked into the MCC and found the walls stripped bare.
If you are a faculty or staff member watching colleagues lose their positions and telling yourself this is not the right time to speak, ask yourself when that time will come, because the people who built this department did not have a right time either. They had a hunger strike.
If you are a student who has been told to keep your head down and focus on your degree, ask yourself what that degree is worth if the institution granting it does not believe your life matters enough to protect.
Stop cowering. That is not what people before you did, and it is not what this moment asks of you.
Contact Chancellor Rich Lyons directly. Tell him you see what he has done. Tell him a chancellor who hands students to a hostile federal government, strips student-won spaces, and defunds ethnic studies does not deserve to lead UC Berkeley.
Chancellor Rich Lyons
Office of the Chancellor, UC Berkeley
200 California Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720
chancellor@berkeley.edu
(510) 642–7464
Contact the UC Regents. They govern this system. They are accountable to the people of California, not to the Trump administration or to donors who want the campus made safe for their politics.
UC Board of Regents
1111 Franklin Street, 12th Floor, Oakland, CA 94607
regents@ucop.edu
(510) 987–9200
Contact the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Department. Let them know you are watching, that you stand with the lecturers being let go, and that you expect the department to fight openly and without apology for its survival and its mission.
Department of Ethnic Studies
506 Barrows Hall, UC Berkeley
ethstd@berkeley.edu
(510) 642–1508
Contact your UC Regents representative. Contact state legislators who fund this university. Contact the UC Office of the President. Write emails, make calls, show up to public meetings, flood their inboxes, and refuse to let any of them pretend this is normal, because it is not normal, and normalizing it is how they win.
The Free Speech Movement was not started by people who sent a politely worded letter and waited. It was started by people who sat down in front of a police car and did not move. You do not have to block a car today (at least not yet). But you do have to do something. Pick up the phone. Send the email. Show up. Bring your friends. Bring your rage. Bring your love for what this place was supposed to be.
The people who hunger-struck for ethnic studies, who occupied Alcatraz, who marched down Telegraph, who built the MCC from nothing, they are not asking you to be perfect. They are asking you to be present. They are asking you to be counted.
Do not let them down. Do not let your silence be mistaken for consent.
Asé. Amen. Así sea. Mexica Tiahui. In Lak’ech. Ubuntu. Ameen.
Dr. César A. Cruz is Co-Founder of Homies Empowerment in East Oakland, a doctoral candidate at Pacific School of Religion and the Graduate Theological Union, and a longtime educator, poet, and organizer rooted in the traditions of liberation. He is a (proud) Cal Alum.
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